Thursday, August 31, 2017

Safety Nets

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Today, a few billion humans live in affluence.Their unsustainable societies have social
safety nets made possible by nonrenewable energy.When they are disrupted by hurricanes,
earthquakes, or famine, food relief is usually shipped in from other regions,
preventing mass starvation.For most of
the human saga, each clan or community was on its own, far less likely to be
rescued by outsiders.

The San people have the oldest DNA of any living
culture.Their DNA is the genetic
foundation of nearly all modern humans.Until
recent decades, they had a sustainable safety net, but herders, farmers, and
others have pushed them off most of their traditional territory.The San now inhabit the Kalahari Desert. On average, two of every five years are drought
years, and severe droughts occur one in every four years.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lot of time with the
San.She wrote her first book about them
in 1958, and her third book in 2006.Like any intelligent culture, their safety net included careful family
planning, to avoid the suffering caused by overpopulation, and its trusty
companions: environmental degradation, hunger, and conflict.

Because of low body fat and hard work, San women began
menstruating later.Some did not have
monthly periods.Children were usually
nursed for about four years, which further reduced mom’s fertility.Most of the women had one to four
offspring.Nomads moved frequently, and
belongings and infants had to be hauled long distances.A woman could only carry one infant, so just
one twin was kept.

When a child could not be kept, the woman gave birth alone,
away from the camp, and buried the newborn before it drew breath.In their culture, a newborn did not
immediately become alive, so disposing it was OK.Crippled or badly deformed infants were not
kept, because they would be a drain on the wellbeing of the band.To avoid unwanted pregnancies in harsh times,
it was common for folks to abstain from intercourse.

Richard Lee wrote about the San.Their primary food was mongongo nuts, which
dropped once a year, but could be gathered all year long.Their secondary food was meat.The Kalahari provided them with about 100
edible plant species, which they were careful not to overuse.The San expected periodic times of scarcity,
so they reserved some plant species for drought food.Portions of their territory were set aside
for lean times.

John Reader wrote about an extreme drought in Botswana that lasted
three years, resulting in the deaths of 250,000 cattle and 180,000 people.The San didn’t starve.Each week they spent 12 to 19 hours foraging
for their sustenance.They knew how to
live.

The outlook for our highly unsustainable society is daunting.It depends on a stable climate, and ever-diminishing
energy resources.Our safety net is
something like a time bomb — tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…

The San thrived by carefully adapting to their wild
ecosystem.Consumers thrive by
eliminating wild ecosystems and replacing them with forest mines, soil mines, mineral
mines, permanent settlements, and complex industrial systems.Our way of life cannot survive a three year
disconnect from fossil energy, or three years of abnormal weather.

In the far north, the Eskimos also had safety nets.The super-frigid arctic was an immensely
challenging habitat for hairless tropical primates.Beyond seasonal eggs and berries, little
foraging was possible.Meat was the
primary food, and hunting was never reliable.

Storing meat or eggs in a treeless land inhabited by hungry polar
bears and wolves was not easy.Their food
preservation methods would gag suburban consumers.In Greenland, Knud Rasmussen got salmonella
after eating kivioq, a yummy delicacy made from dead auks sewn inside a
seal gut and left to rot for two months. This was before antibiotics. He died.

Life was hard.Knud told
the story of a man named Qumangâpik, who had four wives and 15 children.The first wife froze to death, the second was
buried by an avalanche, the third died of illness, and the fourth froze to
death.Of his 15 children, one starved,
four were frozen, and five died of illness.Qumangâpik froze to death, along with his wife and two little children.

Knud’s buddy, Peter Freuchen, went to Greenland in 1906, built
a trading post, married a native woman, and wrote about wild Eskimos — before
their traditional lifestyle had been destabilized by disease, guns, booze, bureaucrats,
and missionaries.In the 1920s, during a
severe storm, his sled dogs refused to continue.So he crawled under the sled and took a
nap.When he awoke, his left leg was
frozen solid.It thawed, rotted, and had
to be amputated.

In the arctic, safety nets had to rely far more on population
management.Survival depended on the
lads who brought the meat home.Without
hunters, everyone starved.Second in
importance was their wives, who could bear more children once the lean times
had passed.Least important were the
elderly and children, especially female youngsters, who would not grow up to be
hunters.There were times when starving
mothers strangled and ate their own children.

When hunting was bad, suicide was common.Elders would take one-way walks into the
frigid night.Old women sometimes asked
a son or daughter to stab them in the heart with a dagger.Old men sometimes asked a son to hang them.At the conclusion of a joyful farewell party,
father and son would rub noses, and then dad would be hoisted up, to begin his
journey to the other side, where game was always abundant.

“There is absolutely no cruelty connected with this,”
Freuchen emphasized.“Fear of death is
unknown among them, they know only love of life… they believe themselves to be
the happiest people on earth living in the most beautiful country there is.” There was no shame in eating the dead, or
killing and eating children and dogs.Survival required it.It was OK.

Vilhelm Moberg described family planning in heathen
Sweden.When a child was born, the
father decided its fate. If he allowed
it to live, it was sprinkled with water and given a name.Sickly and deformed infants were exposed
(abandoned outdoors).In times of
famine, even healthy newborns were exposed, especially girls.The old and infirm were dispatched by pushing
them off the ancestral cliff (ättestup) or by clobbering them with the
ancestral club (ätteklubbor).

Anyway, contact with civilization has now succeeded in
eliminating most sustainable cultures.Infectious
diseases have hammered wild people everywhere.Outsiders introduced the San to dogs and horses, which made overhunting
far easier.They now live in permanent
villages where alcoholism, individualism, and violence are common.Their traditional way of life is essentially
over.

Initially, Freuchen and Rasmussen were proud of their efforts
to help the Eskimos enjoy the wonders of modernity.Guns made it far easier to hunt (and overhunt).Guns made so much noise that they scared
caribou away — they abandoned their normal migration routes, and entire communities
starved.Loud gunfire scared seals
away.Seals shot with guns often sank,
and were lost.By 1908, Rasmussen had
profound regrets.The Eskimos appeared
to be on the path to extinction.

Gretel Ehrlich visited Greenland several times between 1993
and 1999.Unlike the Kalahari, Greenland
had valuable resources to attract greed freaks — cod, seals, walrus, birds,
minerals, and so on.Natives became
addicted to the money economy, and now enjoy year round access to edible
food-like substances imported from elsewhere, fueling population growth.By killing extra fish and wildlife, they earn
the money needed for TVs, electricity, telephones, cigarettes, booze, snowmobiles,
motorboats, guns, ammo…Many were
hunting and fishing as if they were the last generation.

Please note that the sustainable wild cultures mentioned above
would perceive our obsession with perpetual growth, our insatiable hunger for
status trinkets, and our weirdness about abortion to be absolutely insane.An Eskimo gent once told a white foreigner, “Alas,
you are a child in your thoughts.”Tick-tock,
tick-tock, tick-tock…

3 comments:

"Each week they spent 12 to 19 hours foraging for their sustenance." Sigh. Glad this is documented somewhere. So many try to tell me that people were just merely surviving way back when. Surely, at times they were, but so are we, here in the present day. At least everyone was doing good, honest work then. So many fail to see the ticking time bomb that keeps their lives nice and cushy.

Hi Matt! That was "12 to 19 hours" during a three year drought. Every other species of animal lives sustainably, and has for more than a million years. They have perfected "merely surviving." They don't look at their phone 60 to 90 times a day, they don't trash the climate, they don't need psych meds. The blue jays who come to visit me every morning are fully present in reality, fully in tune with the ecosystem, and seem to be very smart and perfectly happy.